This is imaginative but flawed technophilia at best. People with grand visionary ideas always seem to get two things wrong:
1) They underestimate problems with their ideas, and then brush them off with solutions which, when summed together, make the visionary idea much less palatable. For example, the idea that we can abandon traffic lights and stop signs is complicated by the fact that not everybody can, will, or even should use a car to get around. But in the world without traffic lights and stop signs, pedestrians and cyclists are trapped by fear. Sure, they might technically be able to walk out into traffic and the wondercars will stop for them, but in reality, nobody will do that, because the cost of being wrong is death. In every conversation I have had with these technophiles, the solution always ends up being some massively costly network of pedestrian bridges at every intersection of the city. Yeah, not so palatable anymore.
2) They fail to understand that, like evolution, intermediate states have to be viable improvements on their own merits. Wheeled animals do not exist, not because wheeled animals wouldn't have superior mobility, but because no possible intermediate evolutionary state has incremental benefit over the previous legged state. How do you transition a 2 lane road into three lanes when only 50% of the cars are self-driving? What about when 99.9% are self-driving? There are thousands of imaginary future states that do not have credible intermediate states, and will likely never see the future state as a result.
Regarding the first point - have you seen crossing the traffic in Saigon? They mostly don't have traffic lights, but pedestrians nevertheless cross the streets.
With computer in charge it will be even more safer.
Really? Your shining example for crossing traffic is third world traffic? I'm sorry, I fail to see how that's safe at all. And even if it were theoretically safe (it isn't by the way), I fail to see how that maw of scooters, motorcycles and cars would inspire confidence in any pedestrian that they could cross the street and emerge on the other side with their limbs intact.
Better examples are Woonerf or Drachten, Holland and Bohmte, Germany. These are first world cities where traffic signs were removed and streets designed along the shared space philosophy. The now dated analysis (I don't know of recent numbers) says that they are safer now than before this change.
There are a few reasons for why it can work. One is the idea that drivers on a well delimited road become complacent. If it's a road designed for cars, then drivers go faster, believe they have priority, and pay less attention to non-drivers.
You can't just get rid of signs and expect things to work, because signs are the only signifier. For example, the curb is a physical indicator of the boundary between the place for cars and the place for non-cars. Also, if there are more non-drivers often near the streets (cyclists, walkers, people sitting at a cafe table) then drivers will be more attuned to events which are currently rather low.
It also depends on a relatively slow speed. That video for Saigon shows that the traffic is about that of a jog. At that speed, it's easy for drivers to slow down, and easily within the normal reaction time for humans.
If you go this route then you can't have broad, open, clear avenues since that encourages drivers to go a lot faster, which makes things more dangerous.
Those ARE better examples, but unfortunately, they aren't examples that driverless car visionaries are envisioning, as it doesn't represent an advantage to them. They think that their technology will make their commutes faster!
This branch was talking about "crossing traffic" and "the idea that we can abandon traffic lights and stop signs."
It broke off from driverless cars a while back, I think. I personally can't wrap my head around the idea that a personal chauffeur would get rid of city congestion. Who wants to wait more than 5 minutes for their car to come? That sets a maximum distance to wherever the car depot might be.
It is safe, but because they have different rules. Vehicles must give way at all times, so they will drive around you. And drivers are aware of what is going on, because they have to be. I think driving in Vietnam is much safer than the US.
I think it is "safe" only in the sense that people are more expendable in third world countries. Probably poor people who don't have cars and have to cross streets on foot are even more expendable.
Technically they are apparently not wheels because the whole animal/plant rotates, but I'd argue that nature worked out the wheel principle just fine. In fact it seems an incredible cool solution to the problem that there aren't roads everywhere: the whole animal can transform from wheel form to walking form and back. It's almost like a biological Transformer (TM).
Small comment: I dunno about wheeled animals having mobility superior to that of legged animals. How much naturally-occurring flat terrain is out there? How well can wheels drive over rough terrain?
This model of car centric city would be more and more common as man enters uninhabitable outdoor environments. so there would be benefit of starting to adapt to it right now with improving car indoor expirience like drive-ins and not making it harder with car prohibitions and taxing.
With personal cars you will have more degrees of freedom than with trains, busses etc.
And yet, within 100 years, horses completely disappeared from our streets. I think you underestimate the capability for change.
Even today, cities introduce pedestrian areas or limit the number of cars to certain areas, or they have special bus and taxi lanes. It seems likely that they would introduce special "only robot cars" areas eventually, as a first step.
But cars replacing horses didn't cause any of the problems in its intermediate state. They intermingled on the same roads quite well.
The transition from traditional cars to driverless cars will be smooth, insofar as the cars are intermingling. But the supposed additional benefits that idealists like to portray as inevitable are nearly impossible to intermingle. The only way that they can appear is through a forceful transition...eg banning non-driverless cars.
Won't non-driverless cars go extinct anyway, since cars don't last forever? Also I think horses are banned on some streets these days, like motorways...
It also seems to me that the transition to driverless cars will probably sneak up on us: "normal" cars will become more and more intelligent until suddenly they can drive without human input.
I don't think they will ever go extinct, although they might gain significant market share. The AI that driverless cars is using is experiential, not symbolic or pure logic...after accumulating enough experience with a certain situation, it knows what to do. This means that any situation which with there is not enough ability to train the AI would be poorly handled by the AI.
Think of a electrical utility truck. They need to do way more than just follow the rules of the road...and in some cases they need to break the rules of the road.
1) They underestimate problems with their ideas, and then brush them off with solutions which, when summed together, make the visionary idea much less palatable. For example, the idea that we can abandon traffic lights and stop signs is complicated by the fact that not everybody can, will, or even should use a car to get around. But in the world without traffic lights and stop signs, pedestrians and cyclists are trapped by fear. Sure, they might technically be able to walk out into traffic and the wondercars will stop for them, but in reality, nobody will do that, because the cost of being wrong is death. In every conversation I have had with these technophiles, the solution always ends up being some massively costly network of pedestrian bridges at every intersection of the city. Yeah, not so palatable anymore.
2) They fail to understand that, like evolution, intermediate states have to be viable improvements on their own merits. Wheeled animals do not exist, not because wheeled animals wouldn't have superior mobility, but because no possible intermediate evolutionary state has incremental benefit over the previous legged state. How do you transition a 2 lane road into three lanes when only 50% of the cars are self-driving? What about when 99.9% are self-driving? There are thousands of imaginary future states that do not have credible intermediate states, and will likely never see the future state as a result.